Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (59 page)

A masterly rumor identified a native of Toledo, one Jacob Pascal, whose name suggested Passover, as the initiator of the plot. A cabal (a word we have from "Kabbalah") of Iberian Jews was the supplier of poison to Jewish agents elsewhere in Europe—a first international conspiracy. Jews in Geneva, under torture, confessed that the rumor was true, which was all it took.
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As had been the case during the Crusades, the first major conflagration of anti-Jewish violence took place in the Rhineland, where Jews were slaughtered in large numbers. One chronicler reported that twelve thousand were put to death in Mainz—an echo of 1096.
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There was an echo, too, in the resistance the Jews of Mainz put up, and in their self-immolation when all was lost. "By the time the plague had passed," Barbara Tuchman observed, "few Jews were left in Germany or the Low Countries."
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Officials of plague-stricken towns and cities wrote to officials elsewhere, warning of Jewish well poisoners.
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A contemporary chronicler wrote, "In the matter of this plague the Jews throughout the world were reviled and accused in all lands of having caused it through the poison which they are said to have put into the water and the wells—that is what they were accused of—and for this reason the Jews were burnt all the way from the Mediterranean into Germany, but not in Avignon, for the pope protected them there."
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Clement VI was the fourth pope to live at Avignon. He had presided over a lavish court, noted for its splendors. But, as indicated by his rejection of astrological superstition, the catastrophe of the plague brought out something great in him. His story is yet another of those all too rare chapels of heart in this grim history. He ordered the papal curia to maintain its routine as a way of defusing panic in the city, and he gave away a fortune to help those who had been struck down. Most important, and most dangerous to himself, he quelled the anti-Jewish riots in Avignon. He denounced violence against Jews, displaying courage, but also logic. In a papal bull, he pointed out the obvious fact that the supposed instigators of the plague were dying like everyone else. "That the Jews have provided the occasion or the cause for such a crime," he declared, "has no plausibility."
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Clement ordered bishops everywhere to instruct the people not to attack Jews, but unfortunately the provinces under the pope's direct control seem to have been the only places where Jews were not assaulted in large numbers.
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As always, a Jew could escape the torment by accepting baptism, but again, it seems that relatively few did so. As in 1096, the chroniclers report that some Jewish communities—for example, those in Worms and Oppenheim—preempted their tormentors by committing mass suicide.
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"In some cities the Jews themselves," a chronicler noted, "set fire to their houses and cremated themselves."
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The plague was an accelerating moment in the downward spiral of Jewish-Christian conflict, one to match the First Crusade, which had set the gyre winding. After 1348, anti-Jewish stereotyping became more vicious, with the Christian mind fixed on the Jew not merely as an enemy, as before, but also as a mortal threat. After the plague, Christians were more obsessed with death than ever, and a heightened fixation on the agonized death of Jesus, as always, brought with it a renewed scapegoating of the "deicide" Jews. Popes, bishops, and some princes, following Clement VI's lead, would continue to defend Jews from violence and forced conversion, but they would also intensify their sponsorship of the program of proselytizing, which itself became more coercive after the plague. The inability of ecclesiastical and political leaders even now to grasp, as Rosemary Radford Ruether put it, "that the mob merely acted out, in practice, a hatred which the Church taught in theory and enforced in social degradation whenever possible"
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was never more tragic or dangerous.

Because the Jewish community in Iberia had been extraordinarily cohesive and powerful, it had been especially scapegoated as the source of plague poisons. Now it would be especially targeted by the preachers. The steady drumbeat of officially enforced anti-Jewish denigration was heard in churches and synagogues throughout Spain. Despite the tradition of
convivencia,
plague-traumatized Iberian Christians were as subject to a blaming hatred of Jews as any, but the resentment of the peasant class and the urban poor was exacerbated by the relative affluence and social privilege of many Jews in Spain. The post-plague dislocations of agriculture and trade led to a series of economic crises that would shape the daily lives of all classes for more than a century. The fate of the Jews would prove to be tied to something as fundamental as the hunger of peasants, but that hunger could now lead to reactions that once, in Spain, would have been unthinkable.

Through the decade of the 1380s, a particularly ferocious anti-Jewish preacher named Ferrant Martinez operated out of Seville. In his sermons, he identified Jews as the obstacle to the prosperity and amity that were properly due to the faithful followers of Jesus. If Martinez was restrained at all, it was only because neither the king nor the archbishop would tolerate open calls for violence, but then, in 1390, both the king and the archbishop died. Pressure had been building for half a century, and Martinez lit the fuse. "The first terrifying date in the Judeo-Spanish calendar is June 6, 1391." This is the comment of a Spanish journalist, Thilo Ullmann. "In Seville, the rabble-rousing preachings of Ferrant Martinez, the administrator of the archdiocese, incited the massacre of Jews, and the conversion of synagogues to churches. The horror spread to the rest of Spain."
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Henry Kamen, author of
Inquisition and Society in Spain,
says that hundreds of Jews were killed by rioters in Seville in June 1391, and then hundreds more in Valencia and Barcelona, in July and August respectively.
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The Jewish community in Barcelona was so decimated it would never re-cover. Pogroms spread within weeks to dozens of other cities throughout the peninsula, as if coordinated. It was not a matter of coordination, however, but of the now ubiquitous nature of Spanish hatred of Jews, a result of numerous factors—a crucial one of which was the work of preachers.

But the enforced sermons had influenced Jews as well as Christians, as became clear when, for the first time in history, large numbers of Jews responded to the mortal choice—convert or die—by converting. One historian says that in the summer of 1391, Jews "did flock to baptismal fonts across Castile and Aragon."
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There were, to be sure, many Jews who chose to die rather than apostatize, and, as in 1096 and 1348, even to commit suicide. But the decision by many others to become Christian is what makes 1391 a turning point in this story.

By then, educated Jews, like their Christian counterparts, had been influenced by the new rationalism that had swept Europe. Among Jews it was called Averroism.
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This philosophy, with its fine distinctions and dialectical method, perhaps opened Jewish believers, as rationalism had Christians, to an unprecedented skepticism. Jews in Spain, having been more assimilated than Jews elsewhere, may have had their own version of the anticlericalism that prevailed among educated and prosperous Christians—this is the age of Dante—which could have led them to disdain the rabbis and the Talmud. The Kabbalistic assault on wealth and privilege, embodied a century earlier in Don Todros, may have reinforced a feeling of religious alienation on the part of aristocratic Jews, leading them to cast their lots with fellow Christian grandees instead of fellow Jews. In addition to such factors, the mass conversion of Jews reflects the effect of nearly two generations of being subjected to Christian preaching. In some cases the conversions surely represented genuine spiritual decisions, but more, they must have resulted from the simple experience of having been spiritually worn down by all those unrebutted black robes (or white, or brown). No single reason explains what happened, but the consequence was clear: The preacher-inspired violence of 1391 changed everything in Spain. It created a new class of people, the
conversos.
As a group, they would always be thought of in relation to the initiating crisis:
Conversos
were Jews who converted to avoid being killed.

The preachers saw the conversions of that summer as the beginning of the end, and indeed, the phenomenon stimulated yet another wave of widespread millennial fervor that assuaged the ongoing distress of dispossessed Christians. The coming of the Messiah appeared imminent; the proselytizing campaign was redoubled. Because their rhetoric now carried an at least implicit threat of force, the preachers continued to succeed. At a famous disputation in Tortosa in 1414, fourteen rabbis were forced to defend Judaism, as Nachmanides alone had done in Barcelona 150 years before. But this time, twelve of the fourteen converted on the spot, which thrilled Christians and terrified Jews. In the first twenty-five years of the century, one third to one half of the Jews living on the Iberian peninsula had become Christians,
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a total number of
conversos
of perhaps more than 200,000. Given the long struggle to bring Jews around, Christians might ask, What could be better? Soon enough, however, in the most ironic reversal of this always startling narrative, the question about these same conversions would become, What could be worse?

35. Expulsion in 1492

T
HAT SO MANY
"did flock" to baptismal fonts is a marker for Jews as much as for Christians. Martyrdom or apostasy? The answer had been given its ultimate expression in the story of the seven brothers and their mother in 2 Maccabees, written a hundred years before Christ. "There were also seven brothers who were arrested with their mother. The king tried to force them to taste pig's flesh, which the Law forbids, by torturing them with whips and scourges. One of them, acting as spokesman for the others, said, 'What are you trying to find out from us? We are prepared to die rather than break the laws of our ancestors.' The king, in a fury, ordered pans and cauldrons to be heated over a fire." With the siblings and mother watching, the first brother's torture culminated in his being fried alive. After him, the other brothers, one at a time, were brought forward. "Never!" each one replied to the demand to eat, and each was then subjected to being scalped, his tongue removed, his limbs amputated, his being burned—all while the mother watched. To each one she said, "The Lord God is watching." When her last son refused to eat pig's flesh, the king implored the mother "to advise the youth to save his life." She leaned close to her son and whispered, "I implore you, my child, observe heaven and earth, consider all that is in them, and acknowledge that God made them out of what did not exist, and that mankind comes into being in the same way. Do not fear this executioner, but prove yourself worthy of your brothers, and make death welcome, so that in the day of mercy I may receive you back in your brothers' company."

The boy did so, with a defiant "What are you waiting for? I will not comply with the king's ordinance. I obey the ordinance of the Law given to our ancestors through Moses." The mother watched as this, her youngest son, treated "more cruelly than the others ... met his end undefiled and with perfect trust in the Lord." This seventh chapter of 2 Maccabees is perhaps the most violent passage in the Hebrew Scriptures, yet it ends with the most poignantly understated line in all the Scriptures, too: "The mother was the last to die, after her sons."
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With such a story anchoring the collective memory of Jews, it was no departure from tradition, however much it shocked Christians, when, as a Jewish chronicler of the First Crusade reported, "The women girded their loins ... and slew their own sons and daughters, and then themselves."
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Martyrdom, even self-immolation, was an affirmation of faith—Kiddush Hashem—a way as Marc Cohen puts it, "of reenacting on a human plane the sacrificial cult of the ancient Jerusalem Temple."
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Jewish martyrdom was the steady ideal of Jews in Europe, however much, over the years, individual Jews fell short of it.

But there was another current in the river of medieval Judaism, and it had been given its most eloquent articulation, not surprisingly, by Maimonides. As we saw, the Islamic Almohad persecution drove him from Iberia in 1159. In response to the crisis prompted by the choice to convert or die, Maimonides wrote his "Letter on Apostasy." As it happened, this was not long after Jews were martyred by the thousands in the Rhineland. Maimonides wrote:

Verily, one who preferred to suffer martyrdom in order not to pronounce the Mohammedan confession, has done nobly and well and his reward is great before the Lord. He may be regarded as supremely virtuous as he was willing to surrender his life for the sanctification of the name of God, Blessed be He. Should one, however, inquire of me: "Shall I be slain or pronounce the Mohammedan confession," my answer would be: "Utter the formula and live!" To be sure one should not continue to live in such an environment but until the opportunity presents itself to leave one should be confined to the privacy of his home and conduct his transactions in secret.
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Maimonides is talking here about Islam, which may or may not involve idolatry—the rabbis are divided. He is not talking about Christianity, which, by virtue of the claims made for the divinity of Jesus, is regarded as essentially idolatrous. But there are two important elements to his reasoning that carried over into the minds of Iberian Jews after the
reconquista,
when a range of pressures was already driving Jewish culture underground. First, he asserts that intention is crucial, and second, that one's private integrity as a Jew can be protected even while publicly disavowed. "We are not forced," Maimonides says, "to perform any acts of apostasy but just to recite an empty formula. And if one wishes to practice the six hundred and thirteen precepts in secret, he can do so without punishment unless he voluntarily desecrates the Sabbath. For this form of compulsion requires no action but the recital of a simple formula which the Moslems themselves know was uttered insincerely only to circumvent the King's whims."
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